The present invention is directed to a software virtual disk, often referred to as a RAMdisk, in particular, a RAMdisk for use on an OpenVMS operating system.
Computer users are always looking for ways to speed up operations on their computers. One source of the drag on computer speed is the time it takes to conduct an input/output operation to the hard disk drive or other mechanical disk devices. Such devices are slowed by mechanical movement latencies and I/O bus traffic requirements. One conventional method for avoiding this speed delay is to create a RAMdisk. The computer will treat the RAMdisk as if it were a hard disk drive. Access to a RAMdisk is much quicker than writing or reading to a hard disk drive. The RAMdisk is memory resident in the computer RAM. Thus read and write access speed to a hard disk drive is replaced by main memory access speed to a RAMdisk.
There is a significant down side to the use of a RAMdisk. If the computer system should crash or be powered off, all information in the RAMdisk will be lost. Therefore, users of a RAMdisk must be extra careful to copy these files back to a hard disk at reasonable frequent intervals and must without fail copy the contents of the RAM disk at the completion of any session. It is an object of the present invention to reduce this down side risk of using a RAMdisk.